Brian Alvey

Executive assistant, ninjas wanted

58 days ago

Judith sent this job description around to some of her contacts on LinkedIn. We didn't mention that we don't expect just one person to fill this role. It could easily be two or more people, but here's what we're looking for:

Company: Crowd Fusion, Inc.
Job Title: Executive Assistant
Description: Work with CEO, on-site, 4 or 5 days a week to start. Although this position will be eventually be more 'virtual' it would be best if candidates lived in the NYC, Westchester/NY, Greenwich/CT area.

Skilled in as many of the following as possible:
IM, Gmail, Google Docs, feed readers, etc., Word, Excel, Photoshop, travel booking, online shopping/ordering, contact management, meeting scheduling, research, data scrubbing, application installations - Mac & Windows OSes, marketing presentations, home networking, backups, and bookkeeping.

Career Level: Experienced (Non-Manager)
Education Level: College, or Equivalent
Job Type: Employee, Full Time

Of course if one person could do all of this and is local, I would hire him/her in a heartbeat. Maybe I will be lucky enough to find someone multi-talented like the guy in this video.

Oh heck, I knew we forgot stuff. Chef. Personal trainer. Dog groomer. I guess I can save that for the interviews.
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ComicMix: Online Comic Book Reader 2.0

63 days ago

When we quietly released our new ComicMix comic book reader last Friday, one of our readers quickly wrote me and said, "Congratulations on the new Comics Reader at ComicMix. You've made the best reader around even better. Well done."

Thanks!

We made the layout something way more useable thanks to input from our creators, our readers and some of the best designers I know -- including some big suggestions from Mike Propst last year. I posted over on ComicMix today about the millions of new ways to navigate from page to page and many of the other improved reader features. And that's just our online reader.

I know what you're all thinking: "But how can you make a comic book reader application that doesn't make me fill out a registration form or download and install software or force me to learn yet another slow-loading Flash interface?"

That's easy. We respect our audience. We read these comics too.

Before:

After:

Let me know what you think.
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Twitter's business model

74 days ago

I finally figured out a business model for Twitter. It's advertising based and it only works if Twitter doesn't solve their scaling problems.

The way I see it, the most the Twitter user base needs Twitter to be running smoothly is about fourteen hours a day. That leaves ten hours a day of those cute "please try again later" screens. As long as they can continue to add more people than they lose every day, I could see what I have in mind being a sustainable stream of income. Any large ad network -- like Overture, Federated Media or AOL -- would jump at the chance to get their pool of advertisers in front of this eternally patient, gullible audience.

I totally deserve a Twitter board seat for this.
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Superman, I am so glad you're here!

79 days ago

After a doctor's appointment in the middle of the day today, I stopped at Starbuck's to get Niki the green iced tea she loves. I was wearing a black t-shirt with a silver Superman symbol on the chest.

As I walked in the door, the woman behind the counter said "Superman, I am so glad you're here!" Nice. I told her I had heard they needed help. She said they didn't need help any more, just my order. I ordered Niki's venti unsweetened green iced tea and headed to the end of the counter.

As he was pouring it the next guy asked me if I was worried about it being "green" tea. Funny. I thought about explaining how the drink would only harm me if they brewed it using meteor rocks or that having a weakness to a popular color like Green Lantern does is just lame, but I responded with "It's for Lois."

Because in many ways it was.
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Over in Denver, where the Air is even thinner

79 days ago

Catching up on my feeds, I saw this funny video video in a post by Denver-based early stage investor Brad Feld. It compares the Lenovo X300 to the MacBook Air. I bought an Air a few months back and when my own (much larger) Thinkpad died at our Philly codejam I switched to my Mac. My whole Apple-happy team was disgusted that my Air had been sitting in my backpack unused all week long.

Now that I've switched to a Mac, I doubt I could go back to Windows as a primary desktop. I use my Air to remote control the headless Windows servers in my house, so I have access to anything I need.
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This is not a redesign of my blog

79 days ago

Really, it's my blog's first ever design.

My original blog at alvey.weblogsinc.com was just another Weblogs, Inc. subdomain site in the standard maroon and grey with rounded corners look I gave them all. You could call that one WIN Mark I.

Later on when I did the designs for Cinematical and TV Squad, we gave the old subdomain blogs a very simple variation on those looks with just a green logo. Up until last week, my blog looked a lot like The RSS Weblog still does today -- WIN Mark II. So my site was sharing a design with a bunch of blogs that were retired nearly two years ago!

I wanted my blog to tell people more about me and do a better job of pointing readers to the many projects I'm involved in or ones my friends are doing which I endorse. Now it does. It was designed by a great designer we're working with named Kyle and it runs on our Crowd Fusion platform, of course.
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CBS acquires CNET, wow

84 days ago

As reported on Twitter by the guy running CNET and one of its better talent, CBS is buying CNET. That's very surprising. You'd think Dan Farber would have saved this news for a Gilmor Gang podcast.

How did I post this news before TechCrunch? Of course, it helps that I'm not living on the west coast where it's 4:30 am right now.

One of my friends already speculated that they bought CNET just so they could get the domain name tv.com. Nice.

It's a pretty bold move. CNET is widely looked at as a fix-it job and integrations after acquisitions are always a ton of work even when they go smoothly.

Best of luck to both CBS and CNET!
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Get Shirky

101 days ago

I am speeding along on a train somewhere in New Jersey. In minutes I will be in Philadelphia for this week's Crowd Fusion codejam. Probably on TechMeme I came across a link to an article by Clay Shirky called Gin, Television, and Social Surplus. Intrigued by the title, I loaded it and 20 other articles into Firefox tabs. Many of those loaded articles will never get read, but I am glad I read Clay's from start to finish.

It's clever.

If I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels would've come off the whole enterprise, I'd say it was the sitcom. Starting with the Second World War a whole series of things happened--rising GDP per capita, rising educational attainment, rising life expectancy and, critically, a rising number of people who were working five-day work weeks. For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before--free time.

And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV.

He goes on to compare the total amount of time spent editing the Wikipedia to date and how much time we spend watching television. In the U.S. alone every year we spend 2,000 Wikipedia projects watching television. Wild.

Then he explained how when even a fraction of passive television watching time -- our cognitive surplus -- gets used for collaborative creative efforts how amazing it will be. People like to create. They'd rather be doing something that doing nothing and collaborative Internet projects might be the next revolution's gin and sitcoms.

About the title: A lifetime ago in Internet years, Clay Shirky wrote a column in Jason's Silicon Alley Reporter magazine. Being the naming guy (and the platform guy, yes, yes, I know) I got to give all the columns names. Xeni Jardin's was called Jardin Party. Okay, not my cleverest name. Since it sounded like the movie Get Shorty, I named Clay's column Get Shirky.
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Video of Nick White trapped in an elevator

107 days ago

I worked with Nick White for years at Business Week. I was working more from home in 1999 when this happened, but I remember the horrible story being relayed to me by some co-workers when I was at the McGraw-Hill Building that next week.

Working late on a Friday night he left for a smoke break around 11pm. On the way back up his elevator stopped working. Security guards never noticed his cries for help or the alarm buzzing -- neither did the maintenance crews working over the weekend.

He didn't have a watch or cell phone. He had no idea what day it was, how many hours had elapsed or if it was day or night. He relieved himself down the shaft after prying the elevator door open. When he slept, he had to cover his eyes with his wallet to shield them from the blaring lights.

All he had to eat were Rolaids. He survived 41 hours without a drop of water.

Yes, there was a court settlement. Yes, he still uses elevators. You can't live in NYC and not use them.

I knew his story, but I never even thought about the fact that there was a video of his ordeal. The New Yorker posted it on YouTube.
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Twitterbirth

118 days ago

Niki and I both use Twitter, despite the fact that neither one of us is a teenage girl. When Niki went into labor 10 days ago, she kept her family and friends updated via Twitter. None of them follow her using the service itself. They just kept reloading her blog to see the new updates in her sidebar. To them, Niki was just updating her blog.

While Niki was sending her tweets, I was sending mine. Here's a recap of our birth-related tweets, including the ones about Liv going back into the hospital with severe jaundice. She's much better now.

Niki Going in tomorrow at 6am to be induced! 7:40PM Mar 30
Niki @sarahgilbert, but I am soooo ready for me to have this baby. This is the longest preg so far...39.5 weeks. i am excited too, also nervous. 10:58PM Mar 30
Niki I have a bad tummy ache. Can't figure out if it is the v spicy Mexican food I had for dinner or a case of nervous jitters. Probably both! 11:01PM Mar 30
Brian Waiting in the admission room while Niki gets her blood drawn. I can't wait to explain to our daughter that they use a red pen for that. ;-) 7:07AM Mar 31
Brian 6am at the hospital on two hours sleep -- surrounded by soda machines -- is making me reconsider that whole "I'm giving up Diet Coke" thing. 7:23AM Mar 31
Brian Wondering if I can live Twitter Niki giving birth to our girl today and make every tweet exactly one hundred and forty characters. Unlikely. 7:52AM Mar 31
Brian Niki's dictating a Twitter message for me to send from her Verizon Samsung phone. I am totally lost without my BlackBerry's qwerty keyboard. 8:45AM Mar 31
Niki Starting IV now. 8:57AM Mar 31
Niki Makes sense. You can't have 'Liv' without 'iv'. 9:02AM Mar 31
Niki Just broke my water. 9:21AM Mar 31
Brian After the second Nirvana song came on Niki's iPod (not my doing, I swear) Niki had me switch to all Jack Johnson. Now that's birthing music. 9:23AM Mar 31
Niki Nurse asked if I am organ donor. Very reassuring. 9:46AM Mar 31

Continue reading Twitterbirth ›
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